This June, I taught alongside Wake Forest Law Professor Jonathan Cardi at Wake’s Worrell House in Hampstead, London.
We studied English legal history immersively with twelve future lawyers—reading and experiencing how art, literature, religion, and culture intersect with their future vocations in law. We turned the pages of 400-year-old legal manuscripts at the British Library Rare Books room; viewed artifacts in the British Museum through the lens of law and justice; watched Toheeb Jimoh as Prince Harry choose between different his “fathers” of Henry IV, Falstaff—or the Chief Justice; peered into what’s left of the infamous Newgate cells in the basement of a pub; saw English legal wigs in the Royal Courts of Justice and pondered what they represent; made seventeenth-century hot chocolate; dove into the Faerie Queene‘s allegory of justice; observed a murder trial at the Old Bailey; performed Shakespeare aloud; explored how the Renaissance experimented with restorative justice in George Herbert’s poetry and prose; and criss-crossed London on foot and in the London Underground. I learned so much from the Wake Forest law students and from Professor Cardi, and lived the truth in Robert Cover’s words:
[T]he rules and principles of justice, the formal institutions of the law, and the conventions of a social order are, indeed, important to that world; they are, however, but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention.
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live. — “Nomos and Narrative”
